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Confessions of a vegan

Sam de Brito

Aside from militant cyclists, racists, bullies and Roosters fans, the people who used to shit me most profoundly were vegans.

Self-righteous, hectoring, humourless, spoilsports - I'd have crossed a crowded dinner table to avoid them, until the fateful day I became one myself.

"You feel like you have come upon genocide that everyone is trying to hide and ignore. And you can no longer participate. And you can no longer keep quiet. And then you are painted as militant, extreme, judgmental.”

Gary Smith

Even saying the words “I’m a vegan” still sounds alien, while the sense of shame I feel for my past sneering at these gentle people endures.

RSPCA: Hypocrisy is Our Mission, by Jo Frederiks.

I realise I was once the bully I despised, imposing my will upon creatures simply because evolution has gifted me a place at the top of the food chain. Even worse I would smirk while spooning the misery of other creatures into my mouth and disparage people’s attempts to explain why it might be wrong.

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Once the light goes on and you realise the food you so blithely eat actually causes massive, life-long, completely avoidable suffering to billions of animals, it’s not an easy epiphany to un-think.

A supermarket never looks the same, butcher shops become very dark places. The perversity of using smiling anthropomorphised animals to advertise packages of their own body parts grows almost chilling.

We didn't even make it this far, by Jo Frederiks

You also realise most vegans aren’t doing it for dietary or faddish reasons but out of compassion and a sense of fairness.

Many also love the taste of meat, eggs and cheese (I certainly do) but realise you can easily survive and thrive without contributing to the almost unfathomable pain and distress inflicted on animals by factory farming.

The enlargement of moral sympathy to include both genders, all races, most religions, the disabled, the poor - even animals and the environment might one day be judged the defining virtue of humans who lived in the 20th and 21st centuries.

I am not a trinket: Industrialised Cruelty, by Jo Frederiks.

Thirty years ago, you could beat a dog on the street and not have stirred a response. Now you'd draw an angry crowd.

Brin recognises at some point - probably sooner than we think - a person's choice to eat meat drenched in suffering rather than produced in a vat, will be judged in much the same way we do a person swanning around in a mink coat.

Kill to Dress, by Jo Frederiks.

Until then, vegans will exist in a space similar to the one once occupied by slavery abolitionists. Gary Smith, who runs a website called The Thinking Vegan, shared a common experience among vegans writing: “When you share what you have learned with your friends and family members, who you deeply respect and love, they show indifference at best.

"You feel like you have come upon genocide everyone is trying to hide and ignore. And you can no longer participate and no longer keep quiet. And then you are painted as militant, extreme, judgmental.”

I came across that quote courtesy of Gold Coast artist Jo Frederiks, who in September will launch an exhibition of her stunning and confronting paintings titled Animal Holocaust.

Every Day, by Jo Frederiks

Frederiks, who grew up on a million-acre cattle farm and, as a youth, helped her dad brand, castrate and export tens of thousands of beasts for slaughter recently had her paintings removed from Facebook after users complained they were "offensive".

I guess they're the same people who'd say vat-grown meat is "disgusting" or "gross", yet are happy to consume the dead flesh of brutalised animals that live in their own excrement and misery.

Jo Frederiks' The Animal Holocaust exhibition can be seen at RQAS Art Gallery, Gold Coast, from September 19-26. You can view more of her work here.

417 comments so far

Meat is murder. Delicous, delicious murder.

Commenter

eric cartman

Date and time

August 02, 2014, 10:27PM

Eat meat, it's neat!

Commenter

Alex

Location

Finley

Date and time

August 03, 2014, 9:13AM

How would you like it?

Commenter

InstantVengeance

Location

Murica

Date and time

August 03, 2014, 9:25AM

My political views change when I eat vegetarian food.

Commenter

Hacka | Canberra

Date and time

August 03, 2014, 10:46AM

Yep. Meat is Murder. Yep, trot out the same old chestnut flavoured gags. So tedious, It would be funny, if it wasn't such a terrible reality for creatures that have at least as much right to a life free of fear, torture and agonising death as you and your fellow contract murderers.

Thank you, Sam, for this piece. Who knows, there may even be some brave individuals who will allow their ideas to be challenged or heart touched by it. Ⓥ

Commenter

Chrissie@Yoga in Recovery

Location

Glenbrook

Date and time

August 03, 2014, 12:57PM

Food for thought, Hacka?

Commenter

MichaelP

Location

Canberra

Date and time

August 03, 2014, 1:09PM

@ Chrissie @ yoga and other vegans,

So it's not Ok to eat some chicken nuggets, yet abortion and euthanasia are OK?

That sounds fair and righteous to me.

Commenter

Jack

Date and time

August 03, 2014, 1:24PM

@ Chrissy @ yoga and other vegans,

Just a comment on Sam De Brito's picture of sheep being led into a nazi death camp. What an absolute load of nonsense!!!....So the nazi's torturing and murdering innocent people is comparable to people eating lamb!!....Wow!!!

Funny how the atheists criticise religions, are too intelligent for religion, than they have a religious zeal for not eating kebabs!!!..

Bring on Sam Kekovich to straighten out Sam De Brito!!!!

Commenter

Jack

Date and time

August 03, 2014, 1:46PM

If those vegans are so concerned about animals then why do they eat the animal's food.

If you've ever seen a cow in a paddock then you know they have a good easy life. They eat, they sleep and they poo. They have no stress.

There's a reason the expression "happy as a pig in mud" is true.

Humans are the prime predator. Vegans are an insult to this.

Commenter

Bender

Date and time

August 03, 2014, 1:47PM

You don't have political 'views' Hacka, you have a paid political 'view' which we all know is incapable of change.

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